


waiting (for the rising sun)

by simplyclockwork



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Parental Relationships, Bisexual John Watson, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Falling In Love, First Kiss, First Time, Found Family, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, John Being Shot, John Watson's Childhood, John Watson-centric, Johnlock - Freeform, Like a super super happy ending, Loss of Parent(s), Love at First Sight, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, None of this is done by John, POV Second Person, Parental Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Conflict, Smoking, Sort of? - Freeform, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 08:21:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30103050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyclockwork/pseuds/simplyclockwork
Summary: No one has looked at you like that in a long time. Possibly not ever. But he looks at you, he lays your life out before you, and he doesn’t stop there.
Relationships: John Watson & John Watson's Family, Mike Stamford & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 42
Kudos: 106
Collections: Sherlock and John Stories that Ease the Soul





	waiting (for the rising sun)

**Author's Note:**

> _Waiting for the rising sun,  
>  And I've been waiting so long. _
> 
> \- [The Rising Sun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JLhEsj2x0) \- Tiger Lou
> 
> \---
> 
> I wrote this on my phone last night after it popped into my head as a steady stream of words and refused to leave. No archive warnings apply, but please check the tags before reading. Most of the tags apply to John's father.

You are fifteen when your father drags you into the kitchen with your sister. Sits you down and explains the sins of homosexuality to you both. About the gays, the queers, how they’ll all swallow hellfire at the end of their lives, "mark my words."

Your mother sits in the corner. Once, you thought she would protect you, but now you’re not so sure. Now, your father goes on, voice rising, slurred by one too many drinks in front of the telly, and she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t speak up, just sits in the corner of the kitchen and chain-smokes her way through the half-a-pack remaining from the day before. She’ll need to buy another one before tomorrow if she keeps this up.

All the while, your sister gets quiet. After that night, she gets quieter and quieter until one day, all that silence seems to explode outward. In a year, it'll all become very loud and deafening. Your father will shout, and Harry will leave, and then it’ll just be you, your father, and your mother, who smokes through a pack a day until the cigarettes bleed black into her lungs.

Her last breath will rattle in her chest when you are seventeen. Harry won’t come. You won’t know if it’s because she can’t, or if she was told to stay away. Standing over your mother’s grave, you’ll wonder what it’s like to sink into the dirt. Your father will mutter about how he “always told her to quit smoking,” his voice dry and bitter before your mother is even cold in the ground.

The kitchen will smell like alcohol after her funeral, just as it did that night when your father told you that ‘queer’ was another word for ‘wrong’, and it won’t ever stop until you leave.

•••

You want to be a doctor. Your father calls it a pipe-dream. He wants you to join the army like he did at your age and like his father did before him. He tells you it’ll be good for you, the best thing.

It’ll keep the fear of God in your heart.

“That’s what every man needs,” your father will say, drink in hand, cigarette in the other. “A little fear of God.” It’s ironic how he now smokes like a chimney. How he never did before your mother died. Maybe it’s penance; perhaps it’s just a deep-seated lack of self-awareness. Whatever it is, the house reeks of ash and burning, mingling with the ever-present scent of alcohol fumes.

The worst bit is that fear of God didn’t do your father any good. He came home from the war like a shadow, slipping into a life that didn’t fit. Wife, kids, never quite a steady job. One drink at night in front of the telly, then two, then countless until his face and words blurred like the static-covered screen when they defaulted yet again on the cable bill.

You don’t want to join the army. You can see what it does to people, see it first hand — all you have to do is walk downstairs and see your father slumped in his chair, ashen and smelling like a walking fire hazard. And he’s not the only one who came back broken: your grandfather put a gun in his mouth when he was thirty-five. He left behind a wife and a son who now drinks and smokes himself closer and closer to an early grave with every passing day.

•••

In the end, you do sign up for the military. Your father claps you on the back when you tell him the news. For a moment, you almost believe him when he says he’s proud of you. “Fear of God,” he says firmly, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. Like it’s cemented in place, just an extension of his mouth.

You smile, but it’s strained. Forced. You decide not to tell him that it wasn’t because you wanted to be like him. That you didn’t do it for him. You don’t tell him that you did it because it’s the only way you can become a doctor because your father drank away your tuition, and now you have to tether yourself to a gun just to get away from the hanging smell of cheap booze and menthol cigarettes.

You always tell yourself that you’ll explain. One day, you will tell him. But then you board a train and head off to war, and a heart attack drops him six feet into the ground before you even have your first leave.

•••

The military is good... at first. You feel like you finally found somewhere that makes you feel like you belong. Like you’re wanted. Needed.

Integral.

Of course, it doesn’t last. Nothing ever does, and you’re clearly living on borrowed time because your ticket is punched earlier than you ever thought possible. It’s only been three years. But now you’re lying on your back in shifting sands, your chest aching, lungs filling with blood, and there's a red-edged fire eating you from the inside out.

You’re dying. Dimly, as the sun beats down, as you feel cold despite the sweat on your brow and the heat on your face, you wonder if this is how she felt. Your mother — did she feel like this? Was she like a funeral pyre, burning the way you are burning now?

You live. Barely. The fire eats away at you, nearly takes you down even after you’re stitched up and no longer bleeding. The infection rots away some deeper part of you until you feel like a husk.

Something goes wrong in your head. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, you’re told. You were shot in the shoulder, but now you walk with a limp. The doctors say that it’s all in your head, that it's because you were shot, but you’re not so sure.

You think it's been there all along. The only difference is that, now, it has teeth.

Maybe, like your father smoking away his life after your mother’s death by lung cancer, this is your penance. Or, maybe it’s just the fear of God, spreading like a sickness.

•••

London is too expensive. You can’t afford it, even living in the closet-sized bedsit that your meagre pension doesn't even begin to cover. Your savings will be gone within another two months, and then where will you be?

Nowhere.

You’re living on borrowed time, and you know it. Everyone else seems to know it, too. They avoid eye contact, avoid you like they can see the sickness. Like they can smell it, clinging to your skin no matter how many times you try to wash it off.

You wonder if it smells like stale alcohol and old cigarette smoke.

•••

You are washed up. Greyed-out and empty somewhere deep down where it matters. Once mattered, doesn’t matter now.

The day is almost warm as you limp through the park and try not to notice the way people’s eyes skid away from you like you are something dark against the light.

You never expected to run into an old friend. Correction: you didn’t know you had such a thing. ‘Old friend’ implies you once _had_ a friend, and you’re not sure if you believe that was ever really possible.

But Mike Stamford is a nice bloke, a decent bloke. He takes one look at you and sees something others don’t. He sees that you are lonely, lost, washed up and empty, and he doesn’t turn away.

He does something about it.

He takes you to Bart’s Hospital, a place you haven’t been since before you were shipped overseas to feel a bullet hammer into your body. From back when getting shot at was only something that happened in your dreams, and you didn’t yet intimately know the taste of sand.

The labs are different, high-tech, nothing like back in your day. You comment on it, and Mike says something in reply, but that’s as far as you get because Mike has brought you not just to the lab but also to a man.

You look at him, and he doesn’t look at you, and you can only think one thing.

He is beautiful.

You’ve never thought to use that word for a man before, but here he is, and it’s the only word that fits. Sunsets are beautiful. Flowers are beautiful. This man... he is all that and more. He is dark hair, curls run rampant, sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes. They look at you, look through you, then deeper. They peel back the layers you’ve been too exhausted to scrub from your skin, and they see beneath.

No one has looked at you like that in a long time. Possibly not ever. But he looks at you, he lays your life out before you, and he doesn’t stop there.

He smells like cigarettes, but not like your father did. There is nothing stale about the man before you. He is fresh, as fresh as new flowers and a burst of sweetness in your mouth when you bite into citrus fruits.

Looking at him, you wait for your father’s voice to fill your head. Surely, what you’re feeling must be wrong. Whenever you’ve looked at men before, he’s been there. Interchangeable with the fear of God that your time in the military was supposed to put into you. Although your dad did that all on his own, with words, stale alcohol, and clouds of billowing smoke.

You wait for his voice to tell you this is sin. That you'll swallow hellfire, all in good time, for thinking this man is beautiful. But it doesn’t come. You wait and watch as the man reads your life in your very stance, in the way that you simply exist, and it doesn’t come.

You look at this beautiful man as he tells you his name is Sherlock Holmes, and the voice of your father is suspiciously silent inside your head.

He tells you your leg is all in your mind, and although you know that, it’s different this time. Hearing it from the lips of someone who can see you the way he does, you almost believe it. Later, you’ll realize he was right all along when you’re gasping for air and breathing out the first real laughter you’ve had in months.

But that’s later, and, right now, you don’t yet know that he’ll change your life. All you know is Mike brought you to a beautiful man, who laid your soul bare with one look and made you feel more seen than you’ve felt since your father sat you and Harry down in the kitchen when you were fifteen.

There’s a flat, a cop car, a murder and a restaurant with a candle for romantic ambiance. He shoots you down when you make a move, and you don’t blame him. He does it with kindness, letting you down gently. It’s all fine, though. You knew it was a pitiful attempt, the kind made by a timid shell of a man. You don’t blame him for turning you down. He is beautiful and brilliant and blazing and so far above you that he might as well be the sun for all that you can reach him.

What would he want with a broken, burnt-out soldier? Nothing.

It’s fine. You don’t blame him.

•••

The first time you taste him, it’s at the crook of his neck, right at the little hollow below his jaw, where your tongue wanders and comes away with a hint of something sweet.

It happens unexpectedly, like a bolt out of the blue. One minute, you’re leaning over to offer him tea, the next, he’s tugging you down into his lap, and now there’s a spreading tea stain on the carpet. Neither of you cares, as he grips you by the hips and spreads his legs, the both of you panting into each other’s mouths until it’s less of a kiss and more like sharing air.

You come in your pants, and he falls to pieces in your arms. Later, you’ll both manage to shed some of your clothing. You’ll step out of jeans and pants, and he’ll lose his shirt in the hall, only to bend you over the kitchen table and push into you with his expensive trousers halfway down his thighs.

You won’t think to ask the question burning in your mind until the next morning when you wake tangled together, and your brain is finally clear enough to make sense of it all.

“Why?” you’ll ask. He’s awake, just like he almost always is, but now it’s the two of you in his large, soft bed, and his fingers are combing through the sweat-stiffened strands of your hair. You meant to get it cut, but he seems to like it long, his nails making tiny paths over your scalp.

Maybe you’ll let it grow out.

He’ll look at you without replying as if he needs you to clarify, even though you know he understands. That’s what he does, he looks at you and knows everything without you even having to speak, and it’s like having someone inside your head, outside your body and wrapped tightly around you all at once.

He looks at you and makes you say it because he never does anything by halves, and you know he holds you to the same standards.

“Why did you turn me down?” you ask, laying your cards at his feet — that worn, ragged-edged deck with its missing pieces and bent corners. You need to know. Otherwise, it’ll eat you up inside.

You lay out your cards.

He takes them, that proverbial flush, and shows his hand.

“I didn’t know,” he says, and that is, in itself, a shock. “I didn’t know you would stay.” His brow creases, those lips — the ones you know the taste of, now — curving downward. “Most people leave. How was I supposed to know you wouldn’t?”

And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Because you understand that, in your way. Sure, everyone who left you left by dying — except for Harry, who left to escape your father, only to become him in the end, drowning at the bottom of a bottle.

How could he have known when you didn’t even know yourself yet? It is here, now, that you see the broken parts of him. They’re not exactly like yours, but they’re close enough: jagged and ragged and almost lining up with your own rough edges. They don’t fit perfectly, but it’s close enough. Better than, because there’s that wiggle room. There's that bit of space for you to make it your own, the two of you, together.

Bending, you discover what his lips taste like when they’re tight and tugged down at the corners. Bitter, like over-brewed coffee or unsweetened tea. They soften as you keep at it, the flavour changing from biting to sweet, invigorating and inviting you in with a flick of his tongue.

As you kiss those lips, you remember how you first saw him, all those months ago, surrounded by equipment you’d never have dared to imagine during your own time in that same lab. You remember how you thought of him as beautiful, his appearance changing the very definition of the word for you from that point on, and you smile.

He smiles as well, mouth curling, tasting of something richer, almost decadent. The smile widens, growing when you speak like your voice is something to be marvelled at.

Special.

Cherished.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you tell him. And you mean it. And, because he is himself, and he always knows, you know he believes you. And you know it won’t change.

As he rolls you gently onto your back and presses his mouth to the frantic but joyous beat in your throat, you know that you’ve found where you belong.


End file.
